Tag Archives: wotd

by

Wordnik word of the day: cicisbeo

Today’s word of the day is cicisbeo, used in Italy since the 1700s to mean a professed gallant and attendant of a married woman or “one who dangles about women.” Cicisbeism, then, is “the practice of acting as, or the custom of having, a cicisbeo; the practice of dangling about women.” J. Safford Fiske’s translation of Hippolyte Adolphe Tine’s A Tour through The Pyrenees describes such a fellow this way: “The cicisbeo is a bony cartilaginous gentleman, fixt perpendicularly on his saddle like a telegraph-pole.” The Century Dictionary posits that the word derives from the French chiche, meaning small or little (though perhaps “meager” or “paltry” would be more accurate), plus beau, meaning “beautiful.” In modern French, the word is sigisbée.

by

Wordnik word of the day: sobersides

Today’s word of the day is sobersides, a sedate or serious person. Like yesterday’s word of the day, sobersides is both the singular and plural form. It literally refers to someone whose sides—the face, for example—are sober in the meaning “plain or subdued.” In another era, such a grave and serious person might be said to have “visited the cave of Trophonious,” which was an oracle which left supplicants “pale and dejected.”

by

Wordnik word of the day: jane-of-apes

Today’s word of the day is jane-of-apes, a silly pert girl and the female counterpart of jackanapes, from which the word jane-of-apes was modeled. A jackanapes, which, despite the “s” ending, is not plural, is an impertinent or conceited fellow or a coxcomb. Jackanapes definitely appeared first in Middle English and is usually connected to William de la Pole, Fourth Earl and First Duke of Suffolk (1396-1450), who had the nickname “Jack Napis.”

by

Wordnik word of the day: ruelle

Today’s word of the day is ruelle, which means “the space between a bed and the wall” or “a private circle or assembly at a private house; a circle.” A note by Henri Van Laun to the play Les Précieuses Ridicules (The Pretentious Young Ladies) in The Dramatic Works of Molière Vol. I describes how ruelle went from meaning “small street” or any narrow passage or space in French to describing a part of a room used in the company of précieuses, fashionable women who held salons to socialize and discuss the question of love: “The Précieuses at that time received their visitors lying dressed in a bed, which was placed in an alcove and upon a raised platform. Their fashionable friends (alcovistes) took their places between the bed and the wall, and thus the name ruelle came to be given to all fashionable assemblies.”